Screen/Society--"Sinners" (Ryan Coogler, 2025) + Interdisciplinary Conversation

Film screening and Discussion -- note early 6PM start time!

"Sinners" (Ryan Coogler, 2025, 128 min, USA, DCP)

Join us for a pre-Halloween screening of SINNERS, the record-breaking, four-time Academy Award-winning film that deftly blends Southern Gothic vampire horror, history, music, and folklore to bring to light rich intersections of race, gender, religion, community, and belonging in America.

The screening will be followed by a conversation featuring Duke faculty members Nikki Lane (Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies), Tracie Canada (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology), Courtney Lewis (Director of RISE-US; Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology), and Anna Storti (Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies), who will bring interdisciplinary perspectives to a discussion of these themes, which are masterfully layered throughout the film.

"Although Coogler's film encompasses legend and mysticism, his manner is rationally extravagant; the action, even at its most fantastical, is underpinned by audacious ideas." -- Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Ryan Coogler's Sinners is a big-screen exultation - a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies." -- Manohla Dargis, New York Times

"Coogler takes no hostages, escalating the action into all-out mayhem. But he also delivers riffs on religion, Jim Crow, the power of music as a spiritual force." -- Deborah Ross, The Spectator

[Content warning: SINNERS contains some graphic imagery, particularly during its vampire sequences, but does not feature prolonged or extreme gore.]